Why Windows Media Player Does not play all File Formats

Most of the people in the world use WINDOWS Operating System as it is more user friendly and most of the Third party Applications run on Windows, but coming to the Windows Media Player ( WMP ), we find it to be very shabby because it does not play many different File Formats….

File Formats Supported by Windows Media Player are :

.avi

.wav

.wax

.wma

.wm

.mpg

.mpeg

Eventhoughit supports .avi format most of the .avi files are still not played by WMP, this is the reason why people try downloading other Media Players which support all File Formats …. One of the best Software among them is VLC Media Player….

Now, let us know the reason why WMP cant play all file formats but VLC can ….?

Windows Media Player wants everything to be a WMV file, and half of those don’t always work. It plays some MP4 files and not others; it’s spotty as can be. I just hate when I get some message or other saying that I do not have the right codec or whatever.What’s the point of having a media player embedded in the system that doesn’t work as well as VLC media player, a free player actively given away by VideoLAN.org? How is it that this VLC product, coded by a few guys in their spare time, can do a job 20,000 Microsoft coders cannot make Media Player do? I’d seriously like to know. Does this make any sense to anyone?

The Problem is all about Licensing

What is the point of having a media player that doesn’t work as well as a free player actively given away by VideoLAN.org? This is actually a great question. What Dvorak doesn’t know is that audio, video and container formats are a veritable intellectual property minefield. Microsoft cannot just toss an H.264 decoder into Windows 7 without having to pay royalties to an organization called MPEG-LA. These royalties are not cheap. The sole difference between Apple and Microsoft in this domain is Apple bit the bullet and paid royalty fees to license codecs like H.264, MPEG2 and MPEG4.

Now consider VLC: they are an open-source project released under the GPL. They are providing implementations of audio and video codecs (including H.264, MPEG2, MPEG4, WMV, MP3, AAC, etc., all of which require license fees), but who exactly is paying the licensing costs? The answer is: absolutely nobody.